If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft.
That's because it's covered under first sale doctrine. And being a vehicle (unlike most other goods) has an attached ownership registered with the state in the forms of a registration.
Previously, that was simple. I sell you X; you pay agreed price; we trade green paper for thing. Now, with remotely tied crap, people have no say on their properly owned things. That 3rd party who controls the software can do whateverthefuck they want - and that's because copyright and software erodes actual ownership.
In reality, this "correction" on Tesla's part is no different if I decided to keep a hole in my previous company's servers, and then "reach in" for extra-legal 'modifications'. This should be a federal crime, including interstate commerce clause, wire fraud, and hacking. People should go to prison for this kind of thing. - and I'm talking about C levels, not ground-level techs.
You could just have included the stereo explicitly in the contract. This happens all the time in large purchases like real estate. You would of course need to enforce the contract in a different way than breaking into their car, but it would be enforceable as long as the contract as worded doesn’t run afoul of state and local laws. Not doing that, and forgetting to remove it, well… it seems like consumers are giving up a very large concept of ownership for marginal seller use cases, charitably. Uncharitably it seeks to be a lower grab and cut contract law out of the equation.
Edit: slight rephrasing because I misread your argument, I think we are in agreement
Similarly, once a real estate purchase is completed, all items within the bounds of the property purchased--whether it be roof shingles, trees, or former owner family heirlooms they forgot to take with them--legally become possessions of the new owner unless itemized in a sales contract along with agreed-to stipulations that permit retrieval of the items by the former owner after completion of the sale.
Goodwill (and being a reasonable buyer/seller) goes a long way in situations such as these, and in most situations a buyer and seller will work out property sorting issues amongst themselves. However, there would be nothing legally preventing a buyer that stumbles upon a stash of gold bars left in the basement of their new-to-them house--that they did not know about, and that the previous owner did not disclose--and immediately selling them. [1]
BMW's recent second attempt at "enabling equipment features as a service" is a canary in the coal mine, or trial balloon, so to speak. BMW's argument for heated-seats-as-a-service is, flippantly, "What if the second buyer of the vehicle doesn't want heated seats? They don't have to pay for the service. Problem solved." This distorted-reality C-suite speak so drenched in logic fallacy is worthy of a conversation by itself, but I bring it up to say this: instead of buying a car in the traditional sense, OEMs are attempting to change the model to buying "the physical components comprising a car, and the option to enable features of those physical components".
I want no part of it. I like to use hyperbolic (at least for today) examples adapting commonplace business models for smart home devices, software licenses, hardware compatibility lists, EVs, cloud services, etc. to traditional / legacy / analog items:
- What if you went to use your hammer you've owned for years, only to find out that it can't be used to drive in a nail because the company that made the hammer is no longer in business?
- What if your basement flooded because, while the trench drain around your foundation is physically capable of directing enough water away from your foundation into your sump pump, you didn't opt to pay for the "catastrophic flooding capability" license? Better yet, let's say you paid for the license, but haven't checked your email in a few days (maybe because of the storms, since your power has been out and you don't have ready Internet access) to learn that the credit card the trench-drain-as-a-service company has on file has expired and the license renewal charge was declined, so the license you leased was deactivated via OTA update without notice sent via the post?
- What if you find out while driving that your car brakes won't work because a repair shop you've gone to for years installed a set of third-party brake pads that used to be but are no longer compatible with your car (or part of an OEM-certified or OEM-supported configuration) as the result of a recent firmware update to your car's PCM/ECU?
All of those sound terrifying to me.
[1] Source: myself, but not about gold bars, unfortunately. More than one year post-purchase of a house I purchased, the seller decided they wanted a lamp back that they thought they left at the house prior to its sale. I did not remember if they left it or not, but they did leave several items behind. I sent items to their forwarding address that I deemed to be personal items (e.g. monogrammed clothes), but assumed that all other items were left because they didn't want to take them. I donated all of the items I didn't want, possibly including the lamp they desperately wanted returned, to charities. After spending a good bit of energy harassing me over the lamp, the seller consulted with counsel and learned that they had no options for recourse. The harassment stopped, and I have not heard from them since.
You gonna let the original owner take his chimney over some deal that happened a decade ago that you had no idea about?
I'm fucking over it. If I "own" the device - legally I should own a key to EVERY fucking lock inside it. Digital or physical.
This attitude that it's acceptable to put a little green man inside of something you sell, and then retain control over that sold item using your little green man is insidious and immoral. I want it fucking banned yesterday, and it's rapidly becoming one of my strongest political opinions.
Any remote access after sale has occurred shall be considered a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and shall hold Chief * Officers, upper tier executive positions, and boards of directors fully liable, up to and including reimbursements of 3x per device to the citizens affected, and prison times no less than 1 week to a maximum of 10 years.
Enforcement of this law shall be done by the Federal Trade Commission."
I would LOVE to see something like this.
It's a nice idea though!
End user control over safety critical software is not only dangerous, but a potential source of significant legal liability.
I don't want an EV that's capable of accelerating at the maximum rate supported by the motors.
Sure is - and that's absolutely no reason to lock a person out of a car that they own. They OWN it - they are responsible for modifications (and the liability that comes with them). Exactly the same as every car built without a computer - which was roughly ALL of them until the late 70s/early 80s.
My comment is reasoning for why Tesla has a stake in protecting their reputation; if you don't like it, please don't support their practices by buying their cars.
* Illegal to replace your own brake rotors or pads, as faulty ones can cause safety issues.
* Illegal to replace your own headlights, as bad ones could be too dim or too bright and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to change your own oil, as bad ones could seize up your engine in the middle of the road and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to install a turbocharger, as that makes your car accelerate faster than the manufacturer likes and could cause safety issues.
The end result of this line of thinking leads to a million dollar tractor that a farmer can't fix when they need it most. I much prefer the idea that people are individually responsible for any modifications they choose to make to their cars.
At some point, I assume modifying drive-by-wire systems will become legally restricted.
https://www.autocare.org/government-relations/current-issues...
You can install your own brake pads sure, but as a layman if you installed brake pads of your own design and construction, it might be a bit of an issue.
You can modify your car to your heart's desire and put it in a garage or drive it on a race track. You just cannot go into a public road with them. Totally sensible.
It's like preventing customers from changing their own tires because "they might do it wrong and cause an accident". Yeah, they might. But it's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to prevent that, and it certainly isn't justification for locking down the car to only be drivable with manufacturer-installed tires, or remotely disabling cars that use tires from unapproved brands.
Imagine someone installs a cheap third-party ADAS in a Tesla that causes a multi-car pile-up. Should we expect highway patrol officers be able to determine if some third-party software interfered with the normal operation of the car? And, even if Tesla Inc is legally in the clear because the customer did it, they are the #1 target for bad news headlines because they're 'the Apple of Cars' (at least in terms of how much hype they attract), so by the time they set the record straight they've already lost some good-will.
Li-ion batteries have a huge environmental cost. To hide ⅓ of that material behind software is immoral (imho).
It sounds like they were swapping in a better part because they may have not had the original. In the past that was a “win” for the customer. It seems like Tesla has turned this into a loss for the customer (more weight on the vehicle) and a loss for humanity (70 tons of earth mined for unused lithium).
However, the software that artificially controls how much range the battery pack will produce (outside of the charging & self-protection algos) - that's borderline unethical to DRM.
The car is a 90 (effectively) because Tesla set it up that way.
Now I kind of want to see what Shelby would do.
But they're selling these vehicles. As in, transfer of title to the person they're selling to. Taxes are paid. Transfer is registered with the state(s). Insurance is purchased on vehicles in your possession. And full coverage is required for vehicle loans (another set of showing proper legal transfer).
And, just because some click-wrap software has "We are allowed to murder your family and eat your children" does not make illegal clauses legal. And given in this instance, it was tesla->first owner->second owner->third owner , any click-wrap garbage would have been done by the first owner.
Basically, this is the end-run around physical ownership for all the IoT companies and companies that pay for/demand 100% connectivity. All of these companies that have these always-on remote tie ins are the Darth Vader here - "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
All the EV companies are doing this. I so want to buy an EV. I'm not willing to subvert my ownership rights for that.
E.g. they don't want to sell you a general-purpose GPU, but a GPU that's good for one purpose only, and you have to pay extra to use it for anything else [1]. Tesla is leading the way [2], but I'm sure other automakers are also trying to come up with ways to restrict "personal" vehicles from being used for "commercial" activities.
[1] Nvidia’s updates EULA to ban the use of gamer-oriented GPUs in data centers - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer...
[2] Don’t plan on using your autonomous Tesla to earn money with Uber or Lyft - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-a...
Not to mention they benefit from building up a proprietary ecosystem (CUDA, etc.) from collecting data from users (geforce now, etc.).
It's something of a conspiracy theory.
its all gross and unnecessary
At this point I feel like terrible communication and service is an intentional business strategy for some companies who found that by making support so baroque as to be inaccessible or just eliminating it entirely that they can slash costs accordingly. I do consider it to be nefarious in such cases.